Customer Story: Noe Valley Bakery Puts an End to Post Office Runs

For more than 20 years, people have been flocking to Noe Valley Bakery for fresh-from-the-oven baguettes, chocolate mousse cakes, and breakfast croissants. The central San Francisco institution opened its doors in 1995 and recently opened a second location in the nearby West Portal neighborhood.

The Problem

At its best, baking is a time-consuming, meticulous labor of love. But bookkeeping shouldn’t have to be. For years, Noe Valley Bakery staff received paper invoices, manually logged the numbers, and then sent the invoices onto an accountant. An accountant would process them and then mail them back to the restaurant along with checks to sign. It was a cumbersome process with just a single location, but with two it became increasingly untenable.

The Solution

Fortunately, the bakery was introduced to Plate IQ. Now, invoices are sent for processing simply by using a smartphone app. The data is immediately sent to a cloud-based platform and synced to QuickBooks for the bookkeeper’s convenience.

That means no more long hours manually entering the data. And no more trips to the post office.

The Result

“We started working with Plate IQ in anticipation of our second location, and it was a really great choice,” said owner Mary Gassen. “The system is very easy to use. And despite the fact that our number of invoices has doubled, we haven’t seen an increase in bookkeeping time needed to process invoices or bill pay.”

Plate IQ is an automated accounts payable solution that helps restaurants save time, improve the accuracy of their data, and gain insight into their expenses by automatically extracting data from uploaded invoices.